at a state park in August

The permeability of my heart
A gift. A vulnerability.
He has turned and now I can admire his wetness and gold and green more clearly and also his spots and WHAT A RELIEF that I did turn for no particular reason down German Rd. after leaving Rome, thinking myself headed to a different state park but following a hunch to choose this detour.

He continues to stare at or in spite.
I hear hammering, more gunshots.
Isn’t it great to get out into nature?
WAIT - aren’t we nature?
Listen, I’m not naive. I have been exposed to ideas.
But it’s the simple ones that bowl me over.
Ones like,
“I am not other people,”
and
“Other people aren’t me.”
It’s 70° and there’s a breeze and sun and water and bugs making my business theirs.
Nose running - confirmation that yes, this breeze is a portent of autumn.
The small daddy of this pond’s fish watching me
As I sit listening to crickets, gunshot, in a state park.

Lighter, brighter little fish sampling the surface.
I feel my heart and all of its certain confusion.
The shining, small God of a frog, who’d jumped away when I came to sit down has climbed back onto the bank, now facing me, staring intently either at or in spite of me.

If everything is colonized - and it is - is everything colonized?
Words have more power than we think.
I cannot
I can
I can
I can
I wrestle
With being the colonizer
And of the colonized
And with my own perspectives
My own plasticity.

And yes maybe the water is full of poisons but it’s also full of frogs who haven’t died and fish and bugs that the frogs + fish eat. And what a relief to get out into nature.

Perfect creature. The whole universe in a frog. Like actually stunning.
What does his nervous system tell him about me? Could I check his sex? I’m being presumptuous. We’re only 1.5 ft. apart.
I want to hold him!
No vacancy for camping, yet I’ve seen no one. Good!